The Outside Groove (23 page)

“If I had a Thundermaker car, that is. Which I don't. Which are about a zillion bucks.”

“Another driver can lend you one,” T.T. said. “That's what the announcer guy said.”

“He also pointed out, quite astutely, that I'm not so popular among the other drivers. And, anyway, who's going to lend his car to a girl? These guys can't stand getting
passed
by a girl.”

No one said anything, as if we were all considering my options. “I've got my trophy—two, in fact—and I'm happy with third place for today,” I said, which was a lie. “Maybe next week I'll win again.”

“Road Warriors?” Tammy said.

I nodded.

The Sharks sighed in unison, which made us all laugh. I was happy to see them laughing, although it hurt to think that my days of laughing with them were running out.

The usual post-race party was clogging the driveway, so I parked Hilda on the side of the road and walked up to the house. I crossed the yard where Wade had left tire marks about a month and a half earlier and tried to sneak in the front door without being noticed. Just my luck, Big Daddy and Vin Coates, the
Granite County Record
reporter, were blocking my path. They were arguing about something, but they quieted down when they saw me.

“Hey, Casey,” Vin said as I passed him and walked up the front steps. “Good race today. Congratulations.”

“Vin,” Big Daddy said in what sounded like a warning.

“Thanks, Vin,” I said and walked inside.

I grabbed an apple out of the refrigerator and headed for my room only to meet up with Big Daddy again as he came in the front door. I didn't like the look on his face, and it didn't seem to be bringing him much joy either. “Casey,” he said. “We need to have a little chat.”

Any time Big Daddy used those words,
little chat,
I knew that he meant a
big
chat, although he almost never had big chats with me. He often had them with Wade, usually about how my brother should maintain a better rapport with his racing sponsors, how he should do more public relations outreach, visit the schools, the hospital, build up his image in the eyes of the Circuit scouts. If Big Daddy wanted to have a big chat with me, it must've been about Wade. “Aren't you going to congratulate me?” I said. “I was the Fans' Pick.”

Big Daddy crossed his arms and looked past me into the kitchen. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” I walked to the foot of the stairs and rested my torso on the banister. I decided to spare him any more stress so that he could get back to the party: “Don't worry. I'm not racing against Wade.”

Big Daddy exhaled as if he'd been holding his breath. “That's right, you're not. Not only are you not driving, but you're not to talk to your Uncle Harvey again.”

I froze.

“I should've known something was up. Vin Coates says he followed your crew chief, the punk—”

“Jim's not a punk.”

“Followed his tow truck out to your uncle's garage.”

“You can't stop me from going there.”

“Oh yes I can.”

“No you can't.”

“Well, I sure can stop you from going to Cray College, now, can't I?”

The words were like a boot to the stomach. I dropped onto the stairs, looking up to see that pained grimace of Big Daddy's blurring behind tears pooling steadily in my eyes.

“Look, Casey,” Big Daddy said, trying to sound more reasonable. “That Pembroke Circuit team is sending two people up on Sunday. We can't show them some kind of three-ring circus.”

“I love Uncle Harvey,” I said. “He's a good man.”

“He's a snake,” Big Daddy said, seething.

“What did he ever do to—”

“That's between your uncle and me.”

The first tears spilled onto my cheeks. I wondered where Mom was, what she could do to help me. I thought about telling Big Daddy that she'd known for a while that I'd been training with Uncle Harvey. In that moment, I couldn't figure out whether ratting my mother out would help or hurt matters. All I knew was that I felt sick.

“You're not to see him, to race in the Warriors on Sunday, or to talk to Vin or any other reporters. Understand?”

I tried to answer him but couldn't get any words out.

“We're too close to blow this now.”

Again, I started to speak but failed to form words. I listened to Big Daddy walk into the kitchen and out through the garage door. I wiped my eyes, stood, and headed for my car.

***

Uncle Harvey seemed to have been waiting for me on the front steps of the cottage. He didn't even wave as I pulled into the yard. He scooted over on the steps so I could sit.

“Keep it up, Casey,” he said, “and you could be Rookie of the Year.”

“I'm finished.”

Uncle Harvey nodded, as if he'd been expecting that too. “Guy from the newspaper came out. He tell your dad?”

“Yes.”

“So it goes, then.”

“What happened, Uncle Harvey?” I said and almost started bawling again. “What is
wrong
with him?”

Uncle Harvey sighed. “It's a long story—well, not that long, but it happened a long time ago.”

“I need to hear it.”

“Yeah, you'll probably end up hearing it sooner or later anyway. That reporter seemed to know a fair bit of it. Just promise me one thing.” Uncle Harvey looked me in the eye. He appeared tired, haggard even.

“What?”

“Promise me you'll let this whole matter rest right here. People move on, as they should. And when you can't change things, then, well, the best thing to do is leave them behind.”

“What did my father do?”

“Are you saying you'll keep this promise?”

I gazed toward the shop and didn't speak. Anyone else, and I might have said yes, but I didn't want to lie to Uncle Harvey. I just didn't feel like I could promise anything to anyone, not as angry as I was about the pileup of secrets, lies, and ultimatums my life suddenly amounted to.

Uncle Harvey sighed. “Well, thanks for being honest anyway.” He leaned forward, clasping his hands beneath his chin. “The story actually begins with your mother,” he said.

Uncle Harvey's story didn't take long, but each word stung like a hornet. He'd been Big Daddy's crew chief, just like everyone knew. What I didn't know was that, for as long as Uncle Harvey could remember, he'd also had a desperate crush on Carol Beech, a local girl he remembered from high school, a girl with dreams of seeing the world. My mother. The season when Wade LaPlante started winning a lot of races, Uncle Harvey said, he almost mustered the confidence to ask her out. But my father beat him to it, even though, by that point, Wade LaPlante could've dated any girl in Granite County—did, in fact, “go with more than his fair share,” as my uncle put it. Wade and Carol apparently made a match, and after the final race that season—the Granite Bowl 75—they made it official. My father stood in Victory Lane to receive his trophies for winning both the Bowl and the track championship, and when the announcer asked him to share a few words with the fans, the champ took the microphone and proposed to my mother. In front of the hometown crowd, she said yes.

Uncle Harvey was devastated, he said, but he blamed only himself for hesitating. He and Big Daddy even talked it out, since it'd been no secret to anyone in town that Harvey had been pining for Carol. The brothers agreed to keep the racing team together. If they could get over this bump in the road, then maybe Wade LaPlante Motorsports would prove to have the stuff to make the big time. The Circuit.

Wade Junior was born midway into the following racing season and, with him, a new name for Wade Senior—Big Daddy. Fatherhood seemed to light a new competitive fire under Big Daddy, and by the time the Firecracker 50 had rolled around, some Circuit scouts had called to say they'd be coming up to see him run. On the day the scouts came to Demon's Run, however, Big Daddy ran the worst race of his career—a showing as poor as his rookie days in the Road Warrior division, fans were saying. “He was all over the track,” Uncle Harvey said, “bumping-and-running, biting wall, and generally making a nuisance of himself. Any other driver would've been DQ'ed and on an extended vacation from the raceway.” But the track officials bent every rule there was to keep Big Daddy in the race so the Circuit scouts could see him run.

And run he did, right down into the turn-three ditch on about lap thirty in the fifty-lap race. He didn't even finish.

The scouts lost interest, the whole town was devastated, and people immediately started looking for someone to blame. With Big Daddy's help, they all pointed their fingers at Uncle Harvey. “They said it was sabotage,” Uncle Harvey said. “They said I was still jealous about losing your mom, which was true enough. But, still...” Uncle Harvey stared across the yard in the direction of town and sighed. “Your father came up with about a dozen complaints about the car that'd never been issues before. The springs, tire pressure, sway bar, even his safety harness was too tight. There was nothing right with his car, which told me that there was something definitely wrong with him.”

“Did you ask him?”

“Ask him what?”

“Ask him if anything was wrong with him?”

Uncle Harvey shook his head. “Didn't need to. I knew.”

“Well, what was it?”

Uncle Harvey stared at me as if pondering something. Then he looked down. “I'm afraid I can't tell you,” he said. “That's a part of the story I'm not bringing back.”

“But—”

“Let's just leave it like this: It was easier for your father to go along with his failure being my fault than his. That was the simplest explanation. And, in all honesty, I can't say now that his decision wasn't the right one. People were certainly willing to believe him.” Uncle Harvey laughed to himself—bitterly, it seemed. “As if my whole career as a crew chief didn't hang on your father's success. But did anyone consider that?” He scratched at green paint on his fingernails.

“So, you were barred from Demon's Run?” I said.

“Not barred, but I was definitely unwelcome.”

“And you didn't fight it? You just gave up?”

Uncle Harvey looked at me and chuckled, but I didn't get what was so funny. “Aren't you the one who told me, not ten minutes ago, that you're quitting?” he said.

“I have to. My father said he won't pay for my college if I race again.”

Uncle Harvey made the whistling sound with his teeth. “Well, then, he's got you. He wins again.” He looked across the yard. “Fact is, the whole ordeal made me realize something. I could see that people around here had put your father so high up on a pedestal, were so desperate to see him make it, that they just couldn't accept that he'd let them down. They'd made him into an idol. They believed in him.”

“They're doing the same thing to Wade.”

Uncle Harvey nodded. “Don't get me wrong, I love short-track racing.” He looked at me as if knowing what I was about to say.

“Me too.”

He smiled but quickly frowned again. “But if people were going to lose all sense of ... of ... of
proportion
over this thing, well, then, I'd just as soon walk away.”

I knew so well what that felt like that I didn't need to say anything. I took a look around the yard, recalling my first run up here, the day Jim almost ran me over, and then my first laps around the pasture in Theo. My eye fell on the shed set way back. I noticed the grass surrounding it was flattened. Focusing a little harder, I also saw what looked like flattened grass in the shape of tire tracks connecting the shed and the shop.

I stood and started walking over there.

“There's no point, Casey,” Uncle Harvey said. “It's too late.”

I threw open the shed door to find a gleaming Thundermaker car painted forest green with gold trim, gold letters spelling G
O
C
ASEY
G
O
across the hood and front panels, and a number: 06.

My limbs tingled as if I were seeing an image from a dream, like I'd felt the day I opened my Cray College acceptance letter.

Uncle Harvey came up behind me.

“You built this for me?” I said.

Uncle Harvey sighed. “I probably shouldn't have, but once I got the idea in my head, I couldn't stop. They call that color British Racing Green. Not sure why.”

I didn't know what to say. I wanted to cry.

“It's not such a big deal. I mean, take a look around my yard. Spare parts I got. ”

“Can I drive it?” I said.

Uncle Harvey walked into the shed, reached through the driver's-side window, and yanked out the steering wheel. “Strap in,” he said, “and tell me if you think those

Thundermaker boys are half as special as they think they are.”

I took a spin around the pasture and felt the engine rumbling through the marrow of my bones. I cursed Big Daddy, and then cursed the whole Demon's Run crowd for making me Fans' Pick. I liked the way this car handled, yes I did, and I fit snugly behind the wheel, as if my hands were destined to grip it.

The post-race party had long since ended by the time I got home. In fact, I'd pushed my luck a little bit by staying at Uncle Harvey's till about eleven o'clock. That wasn't so late for me to be out on a summer night, but, then, I rarely went anywhere at any time of year, so I figured my parents would wonder where I'd been. At least I knew my mother would wonder. As far as Big Daddy was concerned, unless I wanted to go to State instead of Cray College, which I didn't, I was no longer an obstacle to the destiny of Wade LaPlante Motorsports. He and Wade were sitting at the dining room table, looking at spreadsheets, when I came in through the door connecting the garage and the kitchen. Neither looked up at me, but I could see Wade's jaw muscles working as I passed him on my way upstairs.